Some existing systems such as global positioning systems determine the location of devices using satellites. Other systems such as collaborative systems determine the location of the devices based on crowd-sourced data. The crowd-sourced data includes location data obtained from mobile devices such as laptops, netbooks, and cellular telephones. The quality and frequency of the obtained, crowd-sourced data varies based on, for example, device type, location, network, operating system, and other variables. While some existing systems are able to limit crowd sourcing to certain device types and operating systems, the existing systems have limited ability to control collection of the crowd-sourced data to exclude poor quality data, to minimize the impact of data collection on the devices, and to adjust performance of the positioning system. For example, the user experience on the reporting devices may degrade based on the frequency and quantity of data collection such that battery life, processing time, and storage on the reporting devices may be negatively affected.